I wonder how many readers, yesterday read the pubic notice in the adver, to let people know that the council is in the process of leasing off nearly all of its open public play spaces, in such areas as west Swindon, mordon, gorsehil etc, they are going to be leased off to the respective parish council. This may seem a good idea, but what it amounts to, is just the council passing the buck to the parish councils to fund and support these areas, which will mean more local parish tax payments to meet the demand. Its was also announced yesterday that C. Tax is go up by around 6% this year, let alone the cost of the police remit, which is now doubled, and as shown today, most chief police offices now earn more than the prime minister. Time for the Yellow Jackets I think.....

Hello - ToBeS here under a different log in - can't seem to get my 'ToBeS' one reactivated.

I've been thinking a lot about the value of Talk Swindon. I think its really worth reactivating

1. The Adver and local BBC are pale shadows of their previous incarnations, and the town is lacking the kind of investigatory and long-term lobbying citizen journalism which happened here

2. Whilst social media has taken over much of the input and discussion, using facebook as a forum is a CRAP option, and I think people are slowly coming round to that. The reasons are numerous: Threads become too long on FB and are impossible to read. Threads on a community page are 'unsearchable' - and statements made are often impossible to find later on (and so its impossible to hold politicians to account later too). Most of the FB community admins have a very restrictive and frequently openly biased editorial control over the content.

I think we CAN make TS work again; we need to see if we can get a quorum of contributors working again for starters; then we can link new threads to a sister FB group page and from there onto other FB pages to stimulate interest and traffic back here. Basically, we can use TS as the 'debate chamber' - and post links to social media in exactly the same way people link to newspaper articles.

Just been told about the council potentially allowing build houses on part of The Lawn, but it doesn't stop there the map I've linked to below shows all of the potential building locations on open green spaces in Swindon. Share on facebook etc.

The people who live in Chapel Street, Buller street, Gypsy lane, bridge end road, are now wondering what is going on, as they have all been subject to council leaflets, which say that Lidls are going to knock down the supermarket in Chapel street, as part of a refurbishing programme....Turns out that the planning dept of the council has made a cock up and no such thing is on the cards, after all it was only refurbished a few years back.. Just more bad management and yes the tax payer paid for the leaflets....Who do you vote for......